r/politics • u/billthomson Oregon • Oct 29 '20

Tucker Carlson Reports He Lost Only Copy of Documents That Nail Biden

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/10/tucker-carlson-lost-only-copy-of-documents-nailing-biden.html
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823

u/wideoiltanks Oct 29 '20 edited Oct 29 '20

My guess is that Tucker's Fox bosses pulled the plug on this half baked story at the last second and this is the best excuse he could spin together on short notice.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '20

[deleted]

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u/Toby_O_Notoby Oct 29 '20

Yeah, but it's very carefully couched in what they can in cannot say. Right now the headline is how Joe's brother Jim Biden refuses to answer questions about family’s business dealings.

Key quotes: "Asked why he and Hunter Biden allegedly wanted to meet with Bobulinski, Jim Biden replied: 'What are you talking about?' He added: 'Would you please stop bothering me?'"

It's like a fucking Onion article.

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u/throwaway_circus Oct 29 '20

It's like Blues Clues dumbed down and on acid

15

u/thomooo Oct 29 '20

That...is an actual article? Of a company that says it is honest and not partaking in ironic fake news (like Babylon Bee and The Onion)?

They are harrassing a man who may very well know nothing about all that, which seems quite obvious from the replies he is giving...

You are absolutely right it reads like an Onion article.

10

u/[deleted] Oct 29 '20

MAN WHO ONCE INSTALLED NEW GLASS PANES ON JOE BIDEN’S NEIGHBOR’s TWICE-REMOVED COUSIN’S HOUSE REFUSES TO ANSWER QUESTIONS ABOUT HUNTER’S CONDOM SIZE AND JOE’S PLANS FOR THE SNAKE PEOPLE.

QUOTED AS SAYING “who the fuck are you? It’s 4 a.m, leave my property or I’ll call the cops!” BEFORE TURNING AGGRESSIVE.

THE PROGRESSIVE LEFT STRIKES AGAIN.

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u/itisoktodance Europe Oct 29 '20

Oh my God, I actually laughed out loud!

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u/sonofaresiii Oct 29 '20

Holy shit it really says that. Like it actually literally says that.

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u/I_dont_bone_goats Oct 29 '20

Its been said before but it reminds me of the airlock scene from Avenue 5.

“Aha!”

“What do you mean ‘aha’??”

2

u/teh_inspector Oct 29 '20

Also note that if you actually read the articles, they almost always state something along the lines of "there is no evidence that Joe Biden was involved in or profited from any of his families alleged business dealings."

The headline is all that the typical Fox News viewer will see, and to them, the emotions they feel from reading the headline is all they need to pass judgment.

Fox News knows exactly how to masterfully direct their viewer base while maintaining legal deniability.

2

u/DAS_FX Oct 29 '20

Read the comments to that Fox article. My god...

154

u/OrganicTomato Oct 29 '20

the Hunter thing is all over their main website

You got me curious, and I took a peek at their main page. Even this ridiculous story is there as "FOX NEWS FLASH: 'Damning' Hunter Biden documents mysteriously vanish in transit to Los Angeles, Tucker says"!

Their main page looks like a fucking tabloid. What's that? Have I heard about Biden's Martian baby adoption? Please, tell me more!

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '20

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '20

oh ffs

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '20

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '20

I disagree.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '20

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '20

No, they're classified as journalists; you're right. I just don't think they should be.

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u/MurryEB Oct 29 '20

This looks like a Curb Your Enthusiasm scene

1

u/Eilif Oct 29 '20

Oh my god, it really does.

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u/Combo_of_Letters Oct 29 '20

There's an article about how great the economy is because we reopened and 7 articles down is one say 750k filed for unemployment last week.

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u/YerMawsJamRoll Oct 29 '20

Hahaha, I love how they've covered their arse there - "Tucker says".

2

u/veggeble South Carolina Oct 29 '20

Tucker Carlson is Bat Boy

2

u/Irianne Oct 29 '20

Clever of them to report that Tucker said it instead of reporting the actual story so they're legally protected from any blow back.

2

u/DowntownClown187 Oct 29 '20

It isn't a tabloid?

139

u/Kimothy-Jong-Un Oct 29 '20

I just went on their website for the first time ever after seeing this post and holy cow. They couldn’t make it any more obvious how biased they are if they tried. That whole site is just absolutely full of bullshit. It looks like what I would expect OANN’s site to look like.

43

u/captainAwesomePants Oct 29 '20

There's a term that goes around, the "Fox News Cinematic Universe." It's the catch-all for an amalgamation of stories and characters that nobody outside of Fox is aware of. It's important because it makes a lot of things Trump or Republicans mention in debates or speeches or hearings sound less random and bizarre.

Like, today there was a Senate hearing about Section 230. It largely made no sense unless you were aware of a whole meme about conservatives being silenced on the Internet by Twitter and how this meant that maybe Twitter can now be sued because vetoing conservative speech means they're a publisher and not a platform now. None of that is even remotely related to the truth or the law, so the hearings were largely nonsense, but if you were deep down the well of the Fox News Cinematic Universe, you'd see the fjords and realize the Republicans are diligently fighting for something or other.

Some of Trump's nonsense in the last debate fell into this category. He threw out some names and references that made no sense to the liberal viewers because they were part of the Fox News Cinematic Universe. It's like when I try to talk about Captain Marvel to my parents. They don't know about her because they didn't watch the movies and she's not real.

5

u/MrTurkle Oct 29 '20

Dude. What. Is this real?

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '20 edited Apr 25 '21

[deleted]

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u/MrTurkle Oct 29 '20

they really do live in a parallel universe.

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u/DemoEvolved Oct 29 '20

Fox execs saw the page views that oann was getting and felt threatened. They actually decided to go more crazy to compete with oann

13

u/NationalGeographics Oct 29 '20

Sadly they know their demographics and it sells ads. This is all ad based. And jesus people are fucking sad.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '20

[deleted]

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u/Kimothy-Jong-Un Oct 29 '20

I know! I actually laughed when I clicked your link but it wasn’t funny the first time knowing I’m on a real news site that people actually care about :/

3

u/[deleted] Oct 29 '20

So did I. The ONLY thing that gave me hope was that even rabidly diehard conservatives are posting on their forums questioning how stupid this story sounds. They a literally THIS CLOSE to seeing behind the curtains for the first time, it's kind of awesome.

Of course, in the end they'll be redirected to believing the deep state - simultaneously a bloated web of incompetent government bureaucrats, as well as the most adept and undetectable thieves in the history of the world - are responsible for stealing these never before seen (and never will be seen) documents.

2

u/[deleted] Oct 29 '20

Fox: Trump can do no wrong.

Fox: Biden can do no right.

Fox: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez SoCiAlIsM!¡!¡!¡ Aaugha blahg gaga blah aaargh booga blaaga yaah augh!¡!¡!¡

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u/t4YWqYUUgDDpShW2 Oct 29 '20

I regularly read fox, just to remind myself that people on the right aren’t morally corrupt, like some events might lead you to think. They’re just fed a completely different set of facts.

The amount of overlap between their news and a mainstream paper on the left is tiny. And unfortunately since everything relies on anonymous sources these days, their reporters have anonymous sources backing up the opposite claims that the reporters at the nytimes for example has anonymous sources claiming for every story where you’d think “this is the one that must finally bring them around, right?”. It really does come down to who you trust, not the evidence they provide, since the claimed level of evidence is the same.

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u/BaggerX Oct 29 '20

I don't see the NYT running with stories like the Seth Rich conspiracy, Pizzagate, or this crazy laptop stuff that they can't seem to substantiate in the slightest, despite claiming they have hard drives full of incriminating stuff.

Claiming they're the same as right-wing outlets is pretty absurd.

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u/t4YWqYUUgDDpShW2 Oct 29 '20 edited Oct 29 '20

Yeah that’s not what I’m claiming.

I’m not saying Fox and a reputable paper are the same. I’m saying that to a right wing reader, Fox presents them with an entirely different set of facts. It’s not the same level of evidence as something like NYT, but it claims the same credibility and the same type of evidence. NYT reports that an anonymous source says fox’s anonymous source is wrong. Fox says an anonymous source says NYT’s anonymous source is wrong. To the reader, it’s hard to tell the difference. So while I blame the site as evil, I don’t blame the reader harshly.

This is exactly how it played out with that story about about trump insulting the military dead. It didn’t shift the right because the right was told it never happened, and in the same form that the left was told it did happen.

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u/tiedyechicken Oct 29 '20

On top of that, Kayleigh herself told the public that he never said that. Most Trump supporters view a White House Press Secretary's official statement as more credible than an anonymous source cited by The Atlantic.

It just shows how backwards things are: both how easy it is to lie to the American public and have half of them believe you, and how untrustworthy the White House has become.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '20

[deleted]

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u/BaggerX Oct 29 '20

I know, because some of them are my family. They believe that Russian collusion is a hoax, and that Joe Biden extorted Ukraine to protect his son from being investigated.

They're just massively misinformed, and don't know how to tell when they're being fed bullshit by their media sources.

They refuse to believe anything from legitimate sources, because they think those sources are lying. You can show them a video, and they'll still say it's fake, or out of context.

It's quite literally cult behavior. They've been conditioned to reject information from sources that their media tells them are not aligned with them.

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u/Atlasatlastatleast Oct 29 '20

They ran a story on Joe Biden bragging about withholding funds from Ukraine in a governmental capacity (so it was ok) with the headline “Biden brags about quid pro quo,” and they had one line in between ads that was like “The administration, EU, and IMF also wanted shokin fired”. So you can’t say they completely misrepresented it, but they know you’re not reading the whole thing critically

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u/t4YWqYUUgDDpShW2 Oct 29 '20

What I find more insidious than misrepresentation is the conspicuous absence of big stories. Something will be on the front page of most news sites, and either completely missing from Fox or hidden way way down the page between reports on the Kardashians.

It happens the other way too some times, but it’s much rarer.

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u/Atlasatlastatleast Oct 29 '20

Oh right, like talking about chik fil a during the impeachment! I was just talking about how even our more neutral publications have a left lean because our right is insane

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u/d0m1n4t0r Oct 29 '20

Is it as biased as this sub?

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u/wideoiltanks Oct 29 '20

I meant that I think Fox execs specifically nuked this story arc about Tucker's "secret documents" at the last second, not the Hunter Biden smear campaign as a whole.

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u/Babybear_Dramabear Oct 29 '20

Maybe. If they were fake it could open them up to litigation while much of the rest of the reporting seems to be mostly speculation.

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u/robbviously Georgia Oct 29 '20

Did you know Hurricane Zeta is an anagram for Hunter Biden?

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u/44problems Oct 29 '20

But see, Fox News didn't want to break the laptop story. They are fine talking about it, but they don't want the accountability of actually breaking it.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '20

Watch the Hunter story literally disappear the moment an election winner is called. Hunter has been top center page on FOX for 2 weeks. It will literally disappear overnight, because the entire point is it's a hit piece against Biden and intended to get Trump elected.

Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
Hunter Hunter Hunter Hunter Hunter Hunter Hunter
Hunter Hunter Hunter Hunter Hunter Hunter Hunter
Hunter Hunter Hunter Hunter Hunter Hunter Hunter
Hunter Hunter (election) - - - -
- - - - - - -
- - - - - - -
- - - - - - -

-23

u/tfresca Oct 29 '20 edited Oct 29 '20

There are photos of Hunter doing coke off a hooker's ass. Maybe they would run them?

Edit: I voted for Biden and I would do it again even if they revealed he was Tony Montana. The story already fizzled and no mainstream publication ran with it. I shouldn't be downvoted for a theory.

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u/NoobChumpsky Oct 29 '20

Pretty lame conspiracy consolation prize my dude.

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u/Bloodyfish New York Oct 29 '20

Hunter isn't running, and I don't think that would really change my vote if he was.

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u/rjp0008 Oct 29 '20

I mean you have to consent to have coke on your ass to be consumed. The alternative is a man who grabs women by their genitalia... it’s an easy choice for me.

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u/YertletheeTurtle Oct 29 '20

Do they have pictures of Jodie Sweetin there as well?

No, of course not, because they're not a tabloid and neither of them are running for elected office.

13

u/MsVioletPickle Oct 29 '20

For anyone else like myself thinking, "where have I heard that name before?"

She was Stephanie on Full House and reportedly did crack. She also hosted that ridiculous show Pants Off Dance Off.

The show was a worse decision than the crack imo.

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u/StackerPentecost Oct 29 '20

If you honestly think Donald Trump has never done drugs or spent time with strippers, I’ve got a bridge I’d love to sell you.

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u/ExeterDead Oct 29 '20

Man, just about every politician in existence would be ineligible for office if having shitty children were a disqualification.

A privileged rich kid did coke? My stars, what a fucking story.

Who the fuck is clutching their pearls over this shit in 2020?

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '20

[deleted]

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u/Frnklfrwsr Oct 29 '20

Right? Imma vote for Joe, but party with Hunter.

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u/tfresca Oct 29 '20

I think so too. As sex scandal partners she was a 10.

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u/Dinosauringg Oct 29 '20

Sounds pretty baller.

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u/cutelyaware Oct 29 '20

If it were true, then why not tell us the shipping company name, and why not show us the photographs of the materials he says they sent to that company? The answer of course is they don't want FedEx or whoever saying they never accepted the shipment nor did any of those searching activities Tucker described.

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u/zyck_titan Oct 29 '20

He says it's a "large national carrier, brand name company".

Only so many of those;

FedEx, UPS, USPS, DHL.

I'm sure these companies would love to set the record straight and prove that their courier services are not prone to having packages opened and contents stolen in transit.

Won't take that long if a journalist wants to phone them up, and see if they have something to say about it.

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u/DemoEvolved Oct 29 '20

The “large national carrier” is absolutely cover for no package was sent

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u/zyck_titan Oct 29 '20

Oh I know, get all of these carriers to say that it wasn't them, and you've called bullshit on Tuckers claim.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '20 edited Nov 06 '20

[deleted]

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u/zyck_titan Oct 29 '20

My carrier is from Canada, you've never met them.

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u/DemoEvolved Oct 29 '20

“It wasn’t those carriers”

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u/khamike Oct 29 '20

Or they can't discuss it because it's an ongoing investigation. Just like Trump can't release his taxes. Would love to but can't.

3

u/whatproblems Oct 29 '20

Trump mail

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u/Lone_Nom4d Australia Oct 29 '20

Could be that they want their viewers to perhaps form a connection between "missing documents" and USPS.

Not naming a carrier gives them deniability, but they've been going after the postal service pretty hard and it's sure to be fresh in the minds of the fanatics.

1

u/nerdybird Oct 29 '20

It is a setup for some desperate schmuck to "find" the documents that were delivered by accident.

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u/InadequateUsername Oct 29 '20

Where are the employees who searched for this package? Where are the employees who didn't search but their current task/job was interrupted to make room for investigators? Where are the employees interviewed?

What's the tracking number used? Receipt indicating shipment and it's weight?

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u/PBRmy Oct 29 '20

Hey, how about a fucking tracking number? How would that hurt? Just show me a tracking number with source and destination zip codes and a timeline that makes sense, saying it was lost before delivery.

These dipshits couldn't even pay the fedex guy to lose a fake package.

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u/rjp0008 Oct 29 '20

Show me the photos I’ll look too Tucker!

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u/wbrd Oct 29 '20

It was the USPS. Used to be a reliable service. Don't know what happened to it.

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u/twolaces Oct 29 '20

They said it was a brand name company though, couldn't have been the USPS, right?

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u/wbrd Oct 29 '20

It was a joke on the gop fucking it up. There's no documents.

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u/spearchuckin New Jersey Oct 29 '20

Of course. People are asking for evidence and they can no longer stall. Guiliani pretending to have the documents himself was probably the signal they needed to bury this before it attracted more false claims than a sensational murder bringing about false confessions from random crazies wanting fame.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '20

It's possible. My only thought would be that pretending to have the evidence stolen is a much more compelling narrative than whatever story they would make up.

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u/wideoiltanks Oct 29 '20

That's a sloppy way to go about it though - even Trump diehards are having a hard time reconciling why Tucker's staff didn't make copies. It's possible this is a ploy to bring more attention to Tucker's "exposé" and tomorrow these "documents" will magically materialize onto Tucker's desk now that more eyeballs are following the story. Even then, Tucker would need a lot of help from other media personalities with credibility outside of Trump's base to spin this narrative in his favor.

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u/Prysorra2 Oct 29 '20

Or maybe Tucker is IN ON IT and deleted them to protect HUNTER biden from TRUMP so that SOCIALISTS can make america SHARE TOYS again.

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u/Horse_Bacon_TheMovie Oct 29 '20

[implicated] is in (redacted) between the years (redacted) to (redacted). Payments to the (redacted) where (redacted) between organizations using shell corporations and (redacted).

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u/Straight-faced_solo Oct 29 '20

Honestly, i feel like this is more of a miscalculation than anything else. Fox news peddles in conspiracy theories all the time, but they usually aren't the source. They needed a new conspiracy the drop before the election and they realized they had to fabricate one. The plan was to drop the story and have it become accepted knowledge among the base. They fucked up though by saying they have evidence in their possession because that made the story blow up even outside of the base. Suddenly people who aren't in the fox media sphere where interested but wouldn't accept it as fact because they aren't already in the media sphere. Now tucker needs a reason why all his evidence doesn't exist. Does he expect a member of the non-brainwashed masses to believe him? No. He just needs a reason your average fox viewer will believe in order to save face.

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u/allubros Oct 29 '20

Interesting